Lansing Art Gallery presents artist talk with Xia Gao

TUESDAY, Nov. 3 — While “Dwell,” an exhibition by artist and MSU professor Xia Gao, has been on display for nearly a month, the artist will finally get to share her thoughts on the exhibit tomorrow.

Xia Gao sets up a piece for her exhibit.

Courtesy photo

An artist talk planned for the exhibit’s Oct. 9 opening had to be rescheduled when Gao’s father died and she had to travel back to her native China for the memorial. In tomorrow’s talk, Gao will lay out the ideas behind “Dwell”, an art exhibition that addresses the effect of air pollution in China.

“Dwell addresses people’s living conditions under air pollution threat, which has drawn serious national cries particularly from urban dwellers in China’s more-developed zones,” Gao said. “It features an onsite-built needle installation to materialize invisible harms in the air and express people’s feeling and stance (towards the issue).”

“We’re really proud to be a part of it,” said Barb Whitney, director of the Lansing Art Gallery, adding that the exhibit is “one of the more thought provoking exhibits we’ve had in a long time.”

One site-specific piece of the exhibit, “Dwell Rest,” features a bed and chair that guests can choose to situate themselves in to look at a complex pattern of near-invisible threads that the artist created with simply a needle. The piece represents the ever-present threat of pollution in densely populated areas and the relative ease with which it can be overlooked.

“The piece is really quite beautiful as you approach the installation, yet as you get close, you can state to feel the oppression that the piece represents,” Whitney said. “I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere. Her work is truly extraordinary.”